Management and diversity management in SMEs in the Czech Republic

It is obvious that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play an important role in economic development and many of them consider qualified and experienced people to be the most important source for achieving expected goals. To apply and develop knowledge, skills and abilities of different people, SMEs should apply strategies, policies and practices on diversity management to create appropriate and attractive job opportunities and working conditions for different generations of people and ensure effective use and development of their potential. Based on the authors' scientific cooperation and research results the goal of the paper is to explore and compare some approaches to people and diversity management in six Czech profit SMEs. The paper summarizes the results of the authors' questionnaire survey on managing people and diversity management in six Czech profit SMEs. The survey was conducted from March to April 2018. The relevant data were obtained from 258 respondents. The respondents were characterized by the type of business, the gender, the age, and nationality. The data analysis was based on the calculation of relative frequencies (as a share from the total number of respondents) and the evaluation of the dependence of responses on gender (male and female respondents) using contingency tables and chi-square tests of independence. Based on the results, the paper aims to answer what the current problems in diversity management in Czech SMEs are and how Czech SMEs do prevent gender and age discrimination of employees. The analysis of people and diversity management policies and practices is focused on employee selection, employee compensation, and discrimination in the workplace. The results show that surveyed SMEs are able to effectively and efficiently prevent gender and age discrimination of employees, however, they should focus more on creating and maintaining employment opportunities and working conditions with regard to the natural diversity of people. Diversity management policies and practices in SMEs should be focused on diverse employee selection, evaluation, compensation, and development. These activities may enable SMEs to attract, employ and develop gender and age diverse groups of people with different knowledge, skills and abilities that may help SMEs to achieve expected organizational results through achieving desired employee results. The results are worth attention from managers of SMEs who are responsible for managing and leading other employees. The results open up new possibilities for further research in the field of diversity management and dealing with gender and age discrimination of employees.